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Thursday, 9 November 2017

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT TIL IT’S GONE

Little bites of information like this appear to be either
seldom preserved, or incredibly hard to find, but I finally found what I needed
to help prove the argument I am going to make here.

In the early 1960s, television programmes were recorded on giant
reels of industry standard videotape, measuring two inches wide, and costing
£200 per half hour. Meanwhile, the biggest star on British TV at the time, Tony
Hancock, was to be paid £4000 per episode for his new ITV series, although he
would be paying for the scripts out of this – the highest paid writer was given
no more than £500. Put another way, that £200 video tape is the equivalent of
nearly FOUR THOUSAND POUNDS today.

This massive expense is the root cause of the problem that “Doctor
Who” fans know all too much about. From the original series that began in 1963,
ninety-seven episodes were destroyed after their broadcast – the video tapes
were transferred to cheaper film stock, to be repeated sold to stations in
other countries, and the expensive tapes were reused for other shows. Quite
often, the BBC did not keep hold of their film copy, or they would also destroy
that later.

This has led to bizarre situations where copies of episodes
have resurfaced, like nine Patrick Troughton-starring episodes being discovered
at a station in Nigeria in 2016 - other episodes have also been animated, using
soundtracks of episodes that someone watching at home had recorded on a
reel-to-reel tape recorder. Only a few seconds of the first transformation from
one Doctor to another still exist, because it was shown in an episode of “Blue
Peter” the BBC still have.

Evidently, there has been a point where the makers of a TV
programme still had to decide whether to swallow the cost of a video tape,
bizarre as that may seem today, or whether the ephemeral nature of TV at the
time, with no home video market in existence, meant that erasing the product of
hard work became a possibility, especially when more expensive colour
broadcasting began.

The results of these decisions can seem baffling today –
three episodes of “Dad’s Army” are still missing, and BBC Four could only start
showing “Top of the Pops” every week from 1977 because only from then was every
episode kept. On the other hand, over fifty episodes of the notorious “Black
and White Minstrel Show,” deemed racist even at the time, still exist, but the
first male-to-male kiss on TV, in a 1960 production of Jean Anouilh’s play “Colombe,”
was lost until 2011 – the context here even more ironic because no-one had
known that the kisser, Sean Connery, would become a star later.

Home video, home streaming, and the insatiable desire for
content, has made the decision on what to keep more democratic than it could
otherwise be – you have to keep everything, because you don’t know what people
may want to re-discover later. The legal loophole that allows members of the
public to keep copyrighted material for their own personal use, without
profiting or gaining from it, was closed in 1979, as a result of bringing the
comedian Bob Monkhouse to court, after lending a copy of a film he had to one
of Terry Wogan’s sons. When Monkhouse died in 2003, his archive of 36,000 video
tapes and countless other films and radio recordings, including multiple
missing episodes of “Hancock’s Half Hour,” and even Sir Lenny Henry’s first
appearance on TV from 1975, in an episode of “New Faces,” something Henry had
been trying to find for forty years. Obviously, Monkhouse saw something there
that was worth keeping.